CONTAGIOUS INSIGHT /
For parents, as well as kids / Lysol’s toy-mending scheme is, on the face of it, targeted at kids, but the mechanism itself requires the involvement of the parents, who are Lysol’s target audience. Lysol has taken a consumer pain point - the difficulty parents experience separating kids from their stuffed animals in order to wash them - and played up to it with a campaign that both humanises the toys by admitting them to a ‘hospital’ and overcomes the separation anxiety of their owners through tracking technology. As Professor Bruce Hood told The Guardian, ‘we anthropomorphise objects, look at them almost as if they have feelings. The children know these objects are not alive but they believe in them as if they are.’ The strategy juxtaposes the scare-factor (alerting parents to the prevalence of harmful bacteria on children’s toys) with the cute-factor (taking care of kids’ toys and fixing their ‘injuries’) to position Lysol as a family-friendly brand, and bring focus to USP of the product they are trying to endorse: a bacteria-killing sanitiser that is ‘gentle’ on fabrics, ‘specially designed to sanitize your family’s clothes’.
Shareable cleaning content / Cleaning products are often viewed as a low-interest category, but through a combination of a clever insight, an abundance of hard work and a lot of attention to detail, Lysol is creating a wealth of shareable content about the power of its laundry detergent with this campaign. First of all, Lysol has promised to repair and sanitise 500 toys, which is no small commitment, but the brand is also doing the additional work of making each toy’s journey trackable and sharing photographs of each child’s stuffed toy doing things like sitting in a hospital waiting room environment or enjoying a ‘teddy spa’. Each story has a ripple-on effect as users share them, each toy represents a new potential customer, and the submissions process doubles as a stylish form of data collection, creating a ready-made audience for Lysol Laundry Sanitizer.
